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Wednesday, 4 February 2015

Time for Kodi Helix, time for a new skin?–Part2

Part one can be seen here, which covered the top level menus, in part two we will delve a bit deeper in to the user interface of the 1080XF Kodi skin and have a good look around. Live TV main menu

TV Channels

I like the little progress indicators under each channel, so you can get a rough idea how much longer is left for that show to run.

TV Channel – Information

One thing I’ve noticed and I am not sure if this is a Kodi or skin issue, is when starting to play a TV Channel its not always automatically brought up to full screen, I have to press the full screen button on the Harmony Universal remote control or press back a few times to put it in to full screen mode.

TV Channel Playback / Guide Overlay

TV Channel Playback / Information

TV Channel Playback / OSD Menu

OSD Menu – Channel schedule

If you select the highlighted button on the OSD menu it the brings up programs that are airing on the channel you are currently watching

Also on the OSD menu are settings for Audio / Video the Record button and some transport control buttons. Radio Channels

EPG (Guide Timeline)

TV Recordings

Home main menu

On the home menu there are default tiles for New Movies and New Shows and two widget panels.

The widgets on the main menus are driven by the ExtendedInfo Script add-on, this is not automatically installed with the skin I don’t think, so you need to ensure its installed.

In the Skin settings under Home –> Manage Custom Home Widgets - you can change what the widgets will display such as:

When changing the widgets function you may need to exit from Kodi and restart it to get them populating.

New Movies – Landscape View

New Shows – Info List View

Movies main menu

Movies Library – Thumbnail View

Movies Library – List View

Movies Library – Info List View

Movies Library – Panel View

Movies Library – Poster View

Movies Library – Banner View

Movies Library – Fanart View

Movie Information Page

There seems to be a bug with missing Aspect Ratio icons / flags as on some titles it does not get displayed, but I believe its on the list to be fixed.

In this screen shot the video format flag is missing, because this particular title is a Blu-ray ISO? I need to check that out.

Moving left reveals the poster

The Choose Art option was pretty crippled but I’ve convinced the developer to add more Artwork Downloader add-on options to run it in Solo mode and full GUI mode, these as yet have not been implemented.

In this screen shot you can see I have added myself the option to run Artwork Downloader in Solo mode as I changed the skins code.

The final release version will look more like this however, where Manual mode is GUI mode and Background mode is SOLO mode in Artwork Downloader.

Movie Playback - Information

Movie Playback – OSD Menu

On the OSD menu there are buttons for Audio / Video Settings, Subtitles, transport controls, info and bookmarks.

In part three we will be looking at the TV Shows and Music libraries and Weather areas.